In fact, many science historians consider Telsa and Einstein as the two greatest scientists of the 20th century.

On July 20, 1931, Tesla appeared on the cover of Time Magazine.

Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla was born on July 10, 1856, in Smiljan, in the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, now known as the Republic of Croatia. After completing his primary and secondary schooling, he continued his education at the Polytechnic Institute in Graz and at the Charles University in Praque.

He had an uncanny ability to imagine and calculate complex diagrams and theorems in his mind. But unlike Marconi or Edison, Tesla was more altruistic than entrepreneurial.

In 1881 Telsa went to work for the Central Telegraph Company in Budapest and in 1882 he took a job with the Edison Continental Company in Paris. During this time, he began developing his theories and inventions on electricity.

In 1884, he emigrated to the United States to meet Thomas Edison. Tesla carried with him a letter of introduction from Charles Batchelor, an Edison business associate overseeing European operations. The letter stated the following: "Dear Mr. Edison: I know two great men and you are one of them, the other is this young man."

Tesla and Edison didn't get along. Edison had invested a lot of time and money into a direct current (DC) system for generating and transmitting electricity but it was inefficient and expensive compared to Tesla's AC system.

Tesla left Edison to join George Westinghouse (who along with author Mark Twain would become his two best friends) to create his AC system, which became our electrical system.

Many of the Tesla inventions were a result of his research into the relationship between magnetism and electricity, similar to the research done by earlier scientists such as Michael Faraday.

He began constructing a towered power plant in Long Island, New York and another in Colorado Springs, Colorado. His intention was to demonstrate how free electrical energy could be transmitted through the core of the planet to any destination on earth.

In an article published in Collier's Weekly, on February 9, 1901, Tesla explains how the earth is a medium for conducting wireless electricity.

He outlined a method for drawing vast amounts of electrical energy from magnetic fields and transmitting wireless electricity through the earth at a great rate of speed, over any distance, to any attuned receiver that would receive and distribute the electricity for whatever use or purpose.

To the right is a sketch representing Tesla's free energy generator, where "t" = a transmitter station, "q" = electricity, "g" = earth and "r" = a receiving station.

Tesla explains that according to his experiments there was no appreciable loss of energy when transmitting energy through the earth.

In his research notes, he states that electricity "q" when transmitted from "t" will arrive at the receiving station "r" if the receiving station covers an area by half the wave.

Incomplete Tesla Inventions

Tesla never completed his work for his planetary free energy generator and wireless electricity. Inevitably, Tesla, Edison and Westinghouse, were financially controlled by the wealthiest man in the world at that time, J. Pierpont Morgan.

Morgan reorganized electricity through a process known as "morganization" infamous for controlling industries such as shipping, communication, banking and energy, thereby undermining the prospect for anything to be "free", at least during the 20th century.

To a certain extent, there was not a lot of resistance to "shutting down" Tesla for although he was generally recognized as a genius far ahead of his time, he was also a bit scary.

Tesla often spoke of creating devices capable of communicating with extraterrestrials, as well as laser weapons, and pocket sized mobile devices capable of sending and receiving text and voice messages through a world wide wireless network, among many other seemingly strange ideas.

Tesla past away on January 7, 1943, when he was 86 years old. He lived alone and died poor in a New York hotel room.

Upon his death, the Alien Property Custodian Office of the United States government proceeded to locate and confiscate all of Tesla's research and materials.

Years later, some of those notes and materials were released to the Tesla Museum in Belgrade, Yugoslavia.